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Vaughn Allex and Denise Allex

This weekend marks 15 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Each year since, StoryCorps has commemorated the day by featuring stories from the parents, wives, husbands, coworkers, and friends of those who died on 9/11. This year we hear from Vaughn Allex, a man whose life was affected in another way.

Vaughn was working at the American Airlines ticket counter at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., on the morning of September 11 checking in passengers on Flight 77. As he was wrapping up, two men who were running late for the flight came to his counter.

Before the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airport security was more lax, and Vaughn did exactly what he was supposed to do — he checked both men’s IDs, asked them a few standard security questions, and then flagged their bags for extra scrutiny.

Vaughn then checked the two men in and they boarded the flight to Los Angeles.

Those two men were among the five hijackers onboard who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people including themselves.

Vaughn, who retired from the airline industry in 2008 and now works for the Department of Homeland Security, came to StoryCorps with his wife, Denise, to discuss how he has felt since learning the next day that he checked in two of the 9/11 hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77.

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Vaughn Allex (VA)

VA: I didn’t know what I had done. It wasn’t until the next day, September 12th that I started finding out what happened. I came to work and people wouldn’t look at me in the eye. And they handed me the manifest for the flight. I just stared at it for a second and then I looked up, I go, “I did it, didn’t I?”

I checked in a family, it was a retiree and his wife. I had time to talk to them. There was a student group and I checked in a lot of those kids, and the parents, teachers. And uh they were gone. They were just all gone.

Once it became known, people didn’t talk to me. And I, I had this wild kind of thing in my mind that everything that happened on September 11th was my fault personally. That I could’ve changed it. I, I felt there was no place for me in the world. There were all these support groups and I didn’t belong there because how do I sit in a room with people that are, that are mourning and crying and they’re like, ”What’s your role in this whole thing?” “Well, I checked in a couple of the hijackers and made sure they got on the flight.”

I might go weeks or months and everything would be just going along just fine and then there’d be something that would trigger it. I was checking in somebody and what she said was, ”My husband got killed on September 11th.” And what I heard was, ”You killed my husband on September 11th.”

You know, you don’t really move past it, it’s still always there in some form. But now, you know, I’m able to talk about it. I mean, I feel like, in, in some ways I’ve, I’ve really have come out of a shadow over the last 15 years and I’m, I’m back in the light now.